Frank Bascombe has a younger girlfriend and a job as a sportswriter. To many men of his age, thirty-eight, this would be a cause for optimism, yet Frank feels the pull of his inner despair and especially of his recent losses - his preferred career has ended, his wife has divorced him, and a tragic accident took his elder son. In the course of this Easter weekend, Frank will lose all the remnants of his familiar life, but will find his way to some kind of peace.

The Sportswriter is the first of a trilogy of novels featuring Ford's American everyman, Frank Bascombe. Its sequels are Independence Day and The Lay of the Land. In 1996 Independence Day became the first novel to win both the Pullitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.